Comment on “The Power of Print”

Reading “The Power of Print: The Role of Literacy in Preserving Native Cultures” (Bernard 1985), I was pleased to learn that the excellent ethnographic work Jesus Salinas Pedraza has been producing with Russell Bernard’s capable guidance is now being published in Spanish. I had previously lamented the fact that it only existed in English and Otomi in a U.S. publication (Scanlon and Lezama 1982). I have never met Bernard personally, but through close association with Jesus Salinas during the time I collaborated as linguistics consultant with the group of teachers who prepared primers for the six Otomi dialects referred to in the article, I came to appreciate Bernard’s professionalism in developing optimally Salinas’ abilities. SIL’s expectations of what a bilingual education program should accomplish, and what the result should be of designing a writing system for a language which has not had one before, are similar to Bernard’s (Larson et al. 1979). Therefore, it distresses me that when referring to the work of SIL his observations are so generalized that they do not reflect the real situation. The points I would like to make are as follows: 1) He speaks of “the failure of the SIL’s efforts to produce a single literate Otomi.” However, there are many Otomies (teachers and others) who learned to read and write their language with the assistance of our linguists. Heriberto Salinas, for instance, was able to do it long before Bernard taught Heriberto’s brother Jesus. If these Otomies are not spontaneously writing in their language it is because they have lacked incentives like the ones Jesus has had. 2) SIL has never prepared “six grades’ worth of instructional materials” for Otomi, like Bernard claims, or for any of the languages of Mexico, because it has never carried on a bilingual education program in the country. Dr. Gonzalo Aguirre Beltran considers that “What Townsend, Pike and their associates of the ILV contribute to solve the problem of our heterogeneous language situation, is linguistic competence of the highest level” (Aguirre Beltran 1983:242). 3) It is not accurate to say that there was “nothing to read in Otomi except the Bible.” How can he say this when in the immediately preceding paragraph he has just said that the materials produced by SIL were “piling up in warehouses?” do agree, however, that the materials produced were like a drop in the bucket, and that in the early years of our work we had not realized the complexity entailed in the task of promoting and establishing the use of the written language as a regular means of communication, especially when the people already had available to them a vast amount of written materials in Spanish and it seemed to them that there was no point in literacy in their mother tongue. SIL understands now the need for large amounts of literature produced by native speakers in order to promote the use of the written form of the language (Wendell 1982). Even so, attaining a self-supporting program of literary production by speakers of the language is not an easy task. 4) Our “major complex” in Ixmiquilpan is a small workshop center where projects in several different languages are being worked on. Here our linguists bring native speakers of the languages they are studying in various parts of the country for concentrated work, in the same fashion as Bernard has been taking Salinas to the United States. The center is not there for the purpose of working in the Otomi language or with the Otomi people of the area. 5) Bernard speaks of Otomi educators rejecting the orthography developed by SIL. It must not be generally known that the alphabet used in the SIL publications was originally set up by the Consejo de Lenguas Indigenas and revised later on by educator and anthropologist Julio de la Fuente when he headed the Patrimonio Indigena del Valle del Mezquital. If the orthography seemed to be SIL’s, it is because we have been the only ones trying to publish reading materials in Otomi for distribution outside of the schools. Bernard himself concludes in 1980 that “the most important reason [for the lack of use of the orthography by the Otomies] . . . we think, is that it is simply not to the Otomies’ economic or political advantage to learn to read and write Otomi. Again and again we were told that the Otomi language was like a ‘brand’ which ‘marked people and made them poor.’ Salinas, who is a schoolteacher, was told by fellow villagers many times that he should see to it that their children learned Spanish and not Otomi” (Bernard 1980: 133). Like Bernard, I am excited about the latest trend in the government’s Indian education program. I see it as the logical next step towards a bilingual education program which has taken a long time to develop fully due to the great odds against it. From this perspective, we must admit that previous efforts in Indian education, in spite of their “inadequacies,” have been successful not only in “promoting” Spanish, but in finally breaking down the strong opposition to the use of the mother tongue in school, either in its verbal or written form. By surviving as distinct programs they succeeded in establishing the foundation on which the present ambitious and promising ones stand.